Authors: Darryl Pinckney
I had no trouble at the station checkpoint, though the East German border police had new detection equipment the size of an iron lung. I was on my invincible American way down Unter den Linden in a taxi, a gaseous plastic Trabant, a make of the East German state auto company. I was thinking that I had to take things down a notch, known to security at the Palast Hotel as I imagined I was. I’d got across the border with newspapers I’d forgot I had on me on my first trip for Bags, and I offered them to the barman. He stashed them sharply, as he did the envelope of West German marks I’d carried to the men’s room in my boot.
Again, I ordered a cocktail and brazenly didn’t touch it. Jay, or J., Bags’s contact, took the architectural drawings and said something about the books that were not available in the German Democratic Republic. He said that he sent his grandmother shopping for rap records when she visited West Germany.
The Palast was tawdry in its East Bloc magnificence. Tiers of bronze or copper panels made the hotel front blind, an echo of the bronze-like mirrors that covered the unfortunate People’s Parliament building across Unter den Linden not far away, late Soviet Modernism of the 1970s, pretentious and off-target, buildings that inspired compassion for the lives that produced them. Lurking across the Spree was a prickly, blackened dome, the indestructible Baroque Revival monstrosity of the early twentieth-century Berlin Cathedral, which I’d never seen the inside of.
It was too cold to walk back to Friedrichstrasse and would soon be too late for the last train. Already J. or Jay was someone I would not see again, a contact in a network Bags was about to lose but would find easier to reconstruct than he expected. Half a million people had massed on the Alexanderplatz the day the pianist Cello most revered died, and I heard in the café that when the government resigned, dancing would be permitted at East German demonstrations.
I’d walked down Unter den Linden some weeks before, from the forced fun of the Palast enjoyed by very few, past the tall gates of the university where W.E.B. Du Bois had been a doctoral candidate during the rule of the last kaiser. In those days, I paid attention to the long arc of his alienation—black nationalism, Stalinism, Ghana, death. But once upon a time he could read Goethe and still go to bed happy every night.
The Neue Wache, that lucid Doric temple by Friedrich Schinkel, had become a shrine, a place of architectural pilgrimage. It was kept empty, except for an eternal flame marking the tomb of an unknown soldier. Usually, shifts of two handsome sentries did duty in the portico. On this night I found an army in front of Schinkel’s guardhouse, a rehearsal for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic.
The mournful band music and the parade of soldiers and sailors in the klieg lights were a country’s funeral for itself. Two older soldiers and a young one watched from the sidelines behind me. The young one had such beautiful cider eyes under his gray helmet, with such an expression of canine suspicion in them, that I had to walk back and look at him again.
East Berlin was so underlit that I could make out the Little Dipper. It suited many like me that the unreal city was surrounded by a society with an inferiority complex. Manfred said that Rosa Luxemburg would have been as nasty as any of them had she gained power. Such people were at their best in the opposition.
The old dream’s yearning had crept comfortably back into my heart. I’d not come to Berlin to be noble and gay. I wasn’t there to get down with history either. I was there to let go in the shadow of either a Teuton or a Tartar thug. My hour, was it coming? I called to it: it’s time, it’s time.
* * *
“The Wall is gone.” She flew back to her car. She’d been on the café phone with the rumor to a friend at a television station. I dropped the milk that I’d hiked to the gas station to buy, the only reason I was at the front door when the redhead Co-op member’s sister screeched to a halt and grabbed her and the butcher’s son.
It was nothing to drive fast in West Berlin, insanely, though people on the opposite corner would lecture you, the foreign pedestrian, if you crossed toward them against a red light. The redhead’s sister had to reverse twice, she was so unsure which turn led where. We met heavy traffic under Speer’s lamps in the Tiergarten. Dozens of incredulous others were leaving their automobiles. We took off.
I ran in the direction of the Brandenburg Gate. There weren’t that many people yet. Some were walking on the Wall, bathed in light from the West, but British soldiers pulled them down. We booed. I tried to listen to what one soldier said on his walkie-talkie. The soldiers formed a line in front of the Wall. Then suddenly they withdrew. Two guys were left on the Wall. One looked like a beefy worker, the other a kid. From the eastern sector came a long shower of water, then two feeble streams. The kid drew cheers from the growing crowd when he sat down and opened an umbrella. The water hit and spun his umbrella. The worker stood with his back to the East and let the water cannon drench him. The water couldn’t move him, much less knock him off, as he raised his fist to the agitated crowd.
Police, or maybe they were soldiers, idled along the sides, occasionally stepping forward to prevent someone from trying to climb up. Periodically the sweeping water pushed us back, more because it was so cold than from any force it had. People darted through puddles, chanting, “Away with the Wall,” and photographers also rushed about. The observation platforms were packed. Now I couldn’t see where the crowd behind me ended. Most eyes were fixed on the two men on the Wall, who were by now standing together, arm in arm, huddled against the water. I couldn’t tell what was going to happen. The police did not seem clear in their minds either, other than to keep calm when they intercepted some excited person.
I saw that behind the Reichstag people were being hauled up and there were no police to stop them. I ran to the edge and raised my hands. I was lifted up and set down on the Berlin Wall. It was at its thickest at the Brandenburg Gate. The surface was wide enough to lie across. More people were coming up. I walked toward the lights at the middle of the Wall, but it became so bright I couldn’t tell where I was putting my feet. The wet made me think they’d reactivate the water. The lights turned the Wall pink and the people shiny as they ran back and forth, each person seeming to talk to himself or herself as in a dream.
The way down looked long. I expected a hard fall, but guys lowered me like a sack. I saw a woman stop in front of the white crosses behind the Reichstag. She put her hands on her cheeks. On one side, the black Spree. On the other, thin trees failing to contain a three-quarter moon. There were cyclist shapes in the dirt path and the red tips of cigarettes everywhere. The S-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse glowed orange in the night, like a UFO. Across No Man’s Land, I heard chants of mass impudence.
The bullet holes in the Invalidenstrasse bridge had been filled in ages ago, but I had the time to count them. It took so long to get across and through the gates into East Berlin. People leaving West Berlin pressed against people leaving East Berlin, and on either side they passed through a gauntlet of applause. Grown men pounded on the hoods of Trabis or passed bottles up to long-coated border guards, the hated Vopos. One looked away, as if ashamed his side had lost. My dear Marcellinus, false gods cannot save a city.
I mounted a ledge next to a group of guards who waved back to people colliding with joy. I saw two women hug each other and pass on. Clap and whistle, and the occupiers would be gone. I couldn’t imagine what this meant to those going in one direction, those coming out the other. I felt alone and in the way. I’d not tried to hug anyone.
In East Berlin, state-owned hotels were ominously quiet. I’d chosen to walk south from the checkpoint and approach the Brandenburg Gate from the eastern side. It took far longer than I had thought. But that was the way it usually was: me trying to get to the noise, to where the party was going on.
The Russian embassy on Unter den Linden was dark, but the one guard waved to me. It was three o’clock in the morning and the Brandenburg Gate was alive. East German police stood around, expressionless. I offered my arm to a woman and we passed through the gate. We backed up and promenaded under the quadriga one more time, stepping lively. She blew me a kiss, but I was still alone. The moon had moved higher, changing from Alpine white to Prussian yellow.
The outlines of hundreds of people showed against the lights at the Wall. For a moment I thought the water had been turned back on, but that was champagne flowing. I made a step with my hands and hoisted people up. Then I was pulled up. It was crowded, crazy with faces wandering back and forth. A festival was going on in the awakened square: people in a state of elation and disbelief. I sat, turned around, and was helped down into the sudden friendliness, the sudden youth of the West Berlin police.
* * *
It was odd to see East German cars parked everywhere and sometimes people in full sail in their nightclothes. Maybe not every white person I saw was German, but it felt like it. Afer and his girlfriend were kissing at a little table and the ChiChi was hosting a riot.
Big Dash was screaming: “Do you like black beer!”
The bar screamed in the awful smoke: “Yes!”
“Do you like Fassbinder!”
“Yes!” That could have been another black beer for some who were present, still smoking their terrible brand of tobacco.
“We are one planet!”
“We are one people!” the Germans screamed in correction, many in stonewashed jeans.
“Let’s hear it for the monks of Neuzeller!” Big Dash also asked everyone to give it up for the Holy Roman Empire.
No one had any idea what he was trying to connect with anymore, but a huge black American comedian of some kind was what an East German might have expected to find in a little bar in the forbidden half of his capital, not far from the notorious Zoo Station and the blue windows of the twenty-four-hour porn theaters and the winking casinos. Maybe some of them had never seen a television picture with the crisp definition of Odell’s, but it did not seem a surprise to East Germans in the way that it was to West Germans that they could speak their mother tongue to non-Germans.
Bags told me I had it wrong, as usual. They all thought we were GIs. He liked to cross his leg behind his other leg and kick me in the hollow of my knee. They also thought every black man in the ChiChi was a hustler, he added. How could they have, with Odell in charge. People over from the deserted German Democratic Republic drank for free, but Odell wasn’t asking for identification. Therefore, his regulars kept in circulation a brandy snifter for donations to Odell’s spontaneity.
Odell assumed that everyone at his party had in common victories in Europe over totalitarianism and authoritarianism, if not Berlin. In 1937 or 1938, when Der Grosser Stern was moved from the Platz der Republik to the Tiergarten, it was made even taller, so that little Goebbels, that horny toad, could not, as they said then, reach Victory’s skirts. For us, that pantomime never got old, but they said no, they’d never heard that, and some faces maybe said they were thinking it was typically American to bring all that up again, especially at an unprecedented time like this. Odell poured.
He was more popular in the privacy of the kitchen, where session musicians were coming out to one another as patriots.
“I feel U.S.-grade American. Job well done.”
They hadn’t tensed up at my presence and they’d even scooted over for me against a counter. Bags wouldn’t let me get in on the fat joint that two musicians passed between themselves. He just reached out and put my arm down. From the way he shook his head I understood that there was something in that joint I didn’t want to mess with. He said West Berlin was finished because the first thing that would happen was that the city would get regulated and what were they going to do with us, the irregulars.
“Moses, you can split. We’re good now. Here, take this atom bomb with you.”
Zippi was losing it. Her makeup had run completely. She looked like she had a spider tattoo on her face. She and a large woman were head-to-head over the bar. Zippi gripped the woman by her henna-soaked hair and the woman had her fingers in Zipporah’s dyed black scalp. They were sobbing and understanding each other, sobbing and understanding. She had fallen out with her family not over her black lover, but because she came back to Berlin, where her family had moved to from Polish Prussia in 1910. Why was she telling strangers things she’d never told me?
My bitch of a white wine date from back-when recoiled from Big Dash’s dancing a jig with her. “Am I Aunt Wanda from Uganda? She I am not.”
“You say kosmonaut, I say astronaut,” Big Dash belted out to two East German youths trying to help each other get to the men’s room in time.
I couldn’t take any more. The emissions from sputtering Trabi and Wartburg engines seemed to have become visible and were floating waist-high in the streets.
* * *
West Berlin had been up all night, crying, honking. Café Rosa hadn’t closed. Smoke was awake, a thick band extending from ceiling to shoulder level. A radio station was interviewing thrilled brother after thrilled brother. At the same time, Stevie Wonder was singing, “They say that heaven is ten zillion light years away,” and there he was, with guys from the architects’ collective, that white boy in all his masculine glamor. “Jed.” The god of Weimar culture pulled me down by my arms. “Jed,
Mensch
.” My forehead scraped his buttons.
He drank all day long and we smoked all day long. We saw an East German family in a supermarket count the varieties of marmalade. We eavesdropped on East Germans giving one another directions and telling one another where they’d been. We smoked in front of a school on the Bundesallee with three Turkish boys. They blew into their hands or kept them tucked in their armpits. They said East German teens had beaten up a friend of theirs behind Bahnhof Zoo, warning him that from now on it was their station.
We found Trabants parked on sidewalks and locked his new BMW next to a big Russian Lada. We bought beer and
bouletten
for some men in Manfred’s pub so that they wouldn’t drink up their one hundred West German marks of Welcome Money. We took the U-Bahn to Kochstrasse and walked into an East Berlin of plastic bags and new down coats. At the Friedrichstrasse station, the line of people trying to leave stretched down the stairs and into the street. We went through the unguarded diplomatic exit and up to the platform. As we went over the river, a little boy with a Bon Jovi haircut said to East Berlin, “Adios.”